1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications/mobile terminals. More particularly, the present invention relates to a mobile terminal capable of downloading, or scanning, or collecting, and viewing, or transmitting, and using coupons.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a problem of how to handle transactions including coupons in retail stores. Coupons in a paper format require manual operation by the cashier at the retail store, taking up valuable customer service time, thus increasing the length of checkout lines, resulting in need of more personnel and thus expenses. Also the logistics involved in further mailing the paper coupons to respective manufacturers for validation and related cash reimbursements to retail stores tie up significant amounts of effort and workload.
Also, at the customer end, there is the problem of how to keep track of, store, find and use the right coupons when visiting retail stores when buying the goods in question. Usually the coupon usage operation by the consumer has been as follows (an example):
A consumer reads a newspaper and finds a coupon insert. The consumer enters a retail store and collects the goods to be purchased. At the checkout counter, the goods are read by a bar code scanner. The consumer gives the cashier the coupons that are valid and the cashier enters the discount, either by bar code scanner or manually. The consumer thus receives a discount on the specific products mentioned in the coupons.
After that, the retail store gathers all the coupons, sorts them out and send them to their respective manufacturers who then credit the retail store's account on respective sums of the discount (in the case of manufacturer reimbursed coupons).
On the larger view there is a rising problem and challenge of how to bring meaningful and acceptable marketing communication, direct marketing, direct response marketing and advertising messages to new wireless mobile terminals that are emerging. These wireless terminals include mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with network connectivity, smart phones and other wireless internet appliances. The wireless couponing system, methodology and apparatus is a new method of providing advertisers and marketers access to their target audiences using wireless terminals.
Presently, there are two types of Internet coupons in use in retail sales.
In one type of Internet coupon arrangement, Internet coupons are downloaded from the Internet by a user and printed on the user's printer. This eliminates the coupon distribution problem from the manufacturer or retail store to the user but does not eliminate the use of paper coupons from the user to the retail store and optionally to the manufacturer.
Another type of Internet coupon arrangement allows the downloading of coupons from the Internet to a smart card of the user. The use of smart cards having coupons stored therein requires special hardware and the coupons stored in the smart card are not easily viewed by the user while in a retail store.